


A bright particular star

by Claire1895



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-11 08:19:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claire1895/pseuds/Claire1895
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Requited love poses some difficulties.  Missing scenes from the end of Gaudy Night through to the end of Busman's Honeymoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well:
> 
> ... . 'Twere all one  
> That I should love a bright particular star  
> And think to wed it, he is so above me:  
> In his bright radiance and collateral light  
> Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.

 

In Oxford, everything had seemed dazzlingly possible. Harriet's kisses had been sweet, eager, and she had laughed more often and more easily than ever before. The punt had bumped and swayed and her face, luminous in moonlight, had been like something out of a dream. _Peter_ , she'd said, and he'd given her his signet ring and that was that. Harriet meant to marry him. Why? Because she chose to. In Oxford, the answer had the blazing simplicity of a proposition in logic. In Rome, in Vienna, in Berlin, it faded, took on blurred and doubtful edges. 

Was she sorry for him? Was she merely tired out, after the long struggle? She had said, once or twice, that she was tired and wanted rest. Perhaps he was safe harbour. If he loved her, he ought not to mind that. But he found that he minded very much. He wanted her for his wife but not only his wife - he wanted a lover, who came to him with desire as well as affection.

Harriet's letters promised undoubted, generous affection. He was astonished by them, by the way an abrupt and almost graceless  tenderness would cut into her fine, poised sentences. _Darling,_  she wrote, and _I miss you absurdly_ and _I_   _remember when you_  - even her hastiest scribbles were shot through with sweetness. A dam somewhere had broken, and he felt flooded, amazed. He didn't know quite what to make of it. Was it really Harriet? Every syllable proclaimed it was - her crisp, honest voice, the severe clarity of every turn of phrase - but the words, the words. He couldn't quite credit them. When he saw her, he thought, it would settle him - once he was back in London and could look into her eyes.  He could gauge, then, what all this meant to her and what part of what she felt was fondness, or pity, and what part desire.

"Hello, Peter," she said, and smiled. It was a glorious smile, delighted and triumphant. When he bent to kiss her, her breath caught a little. It was impossible to think or analyse, with her so close and so pleased to see him.

"Harriet," he said, his hands still at her waist. " _Will_ you marry me?"

Any other woman, after the long weeks of their engagement, the letters, the words, would have been amused or indignant. Harriet was neither. Her mouth was solemn, tender.

"Yes," she said. "I want to."

She wanted to. With Harriet actually in his arms, it felt simple again, a syllogism. 

"I'm glad," he said, foolishly, and still she didn't laugh.

"So am I," she said. "I'd forgotten - I don't think I've ever been so glad."

She looked glad: not tired, or merely fond, but strongly and shiningly happy. He couldn't doubt  any more, but he still felt odd and unsettled, on the back foot somehow.  

He kissed her, because she was smiling at him and he wanted to, and her hands clutched his sleeves, slid over his shoulders. Desire? It was too hard to think, to interpret. She would marry him, anyway, and that alone was more than he had ever dreamt possible. He was dazzled, half-blinded with the luck of it. Bright radiance and collateral light. Where was that from? Shakespeare, obviously, but he was too dazed and unsure to venture further. There would be time enough to think.


	2. Chapter 2

It was Donne, authentic Donne. Harriet laughed on the telephone as he rhapsodised; his heart was hammering, absurdly quick. The thing was such an extravagance, so divinely right, that the only explanation was that Harriet had utterly lost her head. Over him. Not pity, not fondness, but the wild foolishness of infatuation. He flinched back from the word. Harriet wasn't infatuated: she saw him even more clearly than he saw himself, with all his petty vanities and his carelessness and his pride. That woman, whose words could flay him to admiring pieces, was the woman he loved. But she had, inexplicably, done this splendidly foolish thing for him.

When he kissed her some nights later, the amazement of it was still electric in him. Her kiss, as ever, was an echo of his own - she caught the current of his restlessness, pressed her body up against his, and he thought suddenly of touching her. Her hips, her breasts under the sensible knot of her blouse. The neat, compact, familiar lines of her familiar body. She shivered and his hands slid; her body arched. He had meant to exercise restraint until the wedding - his idea of his wedding night had a medieval solemnity and festivity to it which he couldn't give up, despite his awareness of its absurdity - but every tutored instinct told him blandly that here was a woman who was willing, more than willing. Harriet? For a baffling moment, the body in his arms seemed almost anonymous. He took his hand from her breast and stepped back. Harriet. Very flushed, her mouth a little open, and her eyes dark; as he looked, consciousness came back into her expression and a kind of skittishness that she tried to hide by looking him straight in the eye. It was utterly characteristic, utterly Harriet. He apologised, of course, and words came back to them both. No shabby tiger.

Later that night, for the first time in years, his mind paused over the thought of Philip Boyes. It had been a splendid tiger, but it had fled when he looked at it with an abruptness that spoke of some fear, some defensiveness. Had that fellow - his mind balked. Finding that he didn't want to think of it, he set himself to the business of thinking it through with some thoroughness. There was no physical jealousy in him, of that he was sure. But there was a rage that followed the idea that the man had hurt her, alarmed her, taught her to be wary of her own desire. The man had been just the sort of fool who would unconsciously despise a woman who wanted pleasure too frankly. And he had been Harriet's only - that wasn't jealousy, that piercing sensation under his breastbone, it was regret and a kind of protective anger. 

He had the right to feel it, he told himself, or would have the right after the wedding. In marrying him, she surely knew that she would be giving all the longings she had so long deplored - even his protectiveness - free rein. _But why?_ She wants to, he told himself, but it seemed intensely improbable just then. Did she know, exactly, what he was? Harriet, of all people, couldn't be deceived by piffle into thinking of him as an easy man to live with. She knew, none better, his weaknesses and his greed. But then why - she wants to, he almost snarled at himself, and the voice retreated into skeptical, mocking silence.


	3. Chapter 3

Bunter was nervous. There was an unfamiliar, stiff cautiousness about his precision in laying out the morning suit and handing Peter his coffee. Wedding nerves, Peter supposed, were hardly the sole preserve of the groom. Harriet would change Bunter's life too. 

Peter swallowed his coffee, the pulse in his throat making it hard for him to taste any of it. He looked, to himself in the mirror, as white as a ghost. But that was romanticising. What he looked most like was a middle-aged man frightened out of his wits. He could name several murderers who had looked just like this on their first day in court: absurdly well-dressed, very white, with tremors in their hands and at the corners of the mouth. What would Harriet make of it? It was hardly flattering to the bride, this visible terror. But perhaps she felt the same and would understand. 

Harriet wasn't nervous. She was resplendent in cloth of gold, her dark hair and eyes and splendid brow giving her the air of a somewhat piratical queen, acquiring a new territory. She said "I do" and "love, honour, obey" in her exquisite voice and Peter made the proper responses automatically, his mind quite blank. He kissed the bride, politely, when he was told to. She put her hand on his wrist, looking searchingly and a little quizzically up into his face, and feeling flooded back into him. Harriet. My beloved is mine and I am hers.

Jubilation took him and he kissed her again, properly, intensely aware of her fingertips on the cool skin of his wrist, the watching and faintly embarrassed congregation, the fact that today could only end with her in his bed. Their bed. Their house. Their everything. It seemed that only one of them could be nervous at a time; Harriet was pale as they left the church and her hand clutched his arm with a tightness that was almost uncomfortable. She studied him, in the car, with a definite wariness. Not quite the same person. 

He wasn't, precisely, the same. He let his voice burble on, carelessly, through all the absurd adventures of the night - parsnip wine and the kitchen pump - and all the while his blood sang its mindless, wordless song: mine, mine, mine. Her ankles, her knees, her throat, the bones of her wrist; the way her voice shifted and modulated for him, for Bunter, for Mrs Rudd; the quick unruly smile that caught at the corner of her mouth. He shamelessly indulged his greedy possessiveness though it felt, somehow, illicit. It was difficult to believe that she would like it if she knew. 

"Peter," she said that night, her voice a gasp. "Oh -"

It was extraordinary to hear that beautifully moulded voice break. He bent his mouth to her again, and she cried out again and then was silent. Glancing up, he saw her hand across her mouth, her forehead strained.

"Stop that, beloved," he said. He could barely hear his own voice over the rush of blood in his ears. "Harriet -"

"I don't know," Harriet said, looking at him with an odd, blinded look. "Peter, I - stop a moment, will you? I -"

An uneasy feeling came over him and he drew away from her body. He wanted to touch her face instead, her hair, but didn't quite dare.

"What is it, domina?" he said and she laughed, unexpectedly and delightfully.

"Peter, your talent for saying the right thing," her voice was still breathless but now there was laughter threaded in it. "It's uncanny."

"I love you," he said, and she turned abruptly and kissed him, tugging at him and then he was somehow on top of her, though he hadn't planned to be - he had had plans before getting to this point, somewhat elaborate ones, but - Harriet's hair was dark on the pillow, her eyes wide, her mouth a little open, and it was his hands making her look like that. He couldn't stop. 

"P - oh, my lord," and then she began to giggle helplessly into his shoulder. It was the first time he'd ever truly delighted in the absurdities of his title. To Harriet, that slip of the tongue was merely ridiculous and it was, of course, but he took a shocking primitive delight in it as well. It wasn't the _lord_ , especially - but the _my_. It dizzied him. Ideas of conquest, of taking and having and possessing - Harriet wouldn't like how sweet those were to him but, for this one night, he elected to indulge himself. There would be time enough, later, for restraint.


End file.
